It Takes a Woman

Amadou's mother's plea to Hillary

In a move aimed at encouraging white celebrities to voice outrage over the police killing of her son, the mother of Amadou Diallo is seeking to arrange a meeting between her family and U.S. Senate hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The disclosure comes as African American leaders, led by the Reverend Al Sharpton, position themselves behind Mrs. Clinton, urging her to run for the U.S. Senate, possibly against Rudy Giuliani. Black political leaders say the mayor has inflamed tensions between cops and the African American community in the wake of the shooting.

Sharpton told the Voice he will consult with Mrs. Clinton's top black Democratic supporters this week with an eye toward launching negotiations with Senator Chuck Schumer, who is among the First Lady's closest political advisers and a Sharpton ally. If such a meeting were to occur, according to Sharpton, Kadiadou Diallo would implore Mrs. Clinton to issue a statement condemning the four white undercover cops who gunned down her unarmed son in a barrage of 41 bullets in the vestibule of his Bronx home last month.

Mrs. Diallo reportedly also would ask Mrs. Clinton to volunteer to be arrested in a nonviolent civil disobedience protest outside One Police Plaza. The reasoning is that Mrs. Clinton's arrest would draw widespread attention to daily acts of civil disobedience, which Sharpton has organized to demand that the police officers who fired on Diallo be brought to justice.

Sharpton says that Mrs. Diallo's objective is to stir the consciences of white celebrities, hoping they will in turn drum up support for allegations that the city's predominantly white police force is insensitive to minorities, especially African Americans and Latinos.

He says that the whites he has identified "show a sensitivity that I want to appeal to." For example, Streisand, he asserts, might consider reading a letter from him about rampant police brutality in New York City.

The civil disobedience protests are seen as a throwback to the antiapartheid rallies of the 1980s, which attracted white celebrities. Members of Congress, top labor and Jewish leaders, and children of the late Robert F. Kennedy were among those arrested during the nonviolent, 1960s-style protests against the South African system, which denied political rights to the black majority.

Sharpton draws parallels between the former South African regime's attempts to destabilize major African governments that tried to counter sanctions and an alleged campaign by the Giuliani administration to vilify leaders of the civil disobedience movement.

"This is what the New York Police Department is trying to do," he charges. "They're trying to destabilize the movement by meeting with little groups that don't represent anybody and carrying out personal attacks on me. We need blacks, whites."

The civil rights leader says that peaceful demonstrations would encourage whites in cities like New York, Seattle, Boston, Houston, Chicago, and Los Angeles to jump on the arrest bandwagon and demand justice. "I predict that within two weeks people will be protesting in front of their police departments in other cities," he says. "They need to come out, not just talking, but putting their bodies on the line. We must make the New York Police Department persona non grata until they prosecute these officers."

Richard Kahn, the influential former head of the New York State Urban Development Corporation, who is white, vowed during a rally last week at Sharpton's House of Justice in Harlem that he would go to jail over the issue of police brutality.

Since the February 4 shooting of Diallo, his alleged killers, all members of the controversial "Street Crimes Unit," have refused to be questioned by NYPD internal affairs investigators, and remain on desk duty.

Last week, Sharpton launched the civil disobedience campaign during a lunchtime rally on Wall Street that drew thousands of angry blacks. He and 10 others, including the Reverend Wyatt Tee Walker who helped Dr. Martin Luther King plan sit-ins and marches during the civil rights movement were arrested for blocking traffic after they sat down at the intersection of Broadway and Wall Street. Nineteen others were charged with disorderly conduct for staging a sit-in outside the offices of Merrill Lynch at the World Financial Center.

Al Sharpton's appeal to whites is bound to raise eyebrows in black ultranationalist circles, where much more militant responses to the Diallo killing have been urged by the 1999 Million Youth March Black Power Organizing Committee, the New Black Panther Party, the December 12th Movement, and the Code Youth Organization.

"This is the time when Black men [with their] backs straight, eyes steely, no fear, legs strong, standing tall, God out front, guns in hand [should be saying], 'You shoot one of ours 41 times, we shoot 41 of yours one time. One shot, one kill,' " the group, which calls itself the Black Power Coalition, declared in a statement that was read by its leader Khallid Abdul Muhammad at the February 12 homegoing service for Diallo.